Last Saturday GreyHawk wrote this diary about the threatened gun violence at an HCR rally. The photo of the sign has inspired what I'm about to write.
I'm sure some on the Right would say it's just free speech until someone actually fires a weapon. Then the one with the sign will say, "well I'm not responsible for what other people take away from my words." (I've had people say that to me here at dKos).
Still others will say that the debate is healthy.
Before the election I wrote about the possibilities of the rhetoric leading to violence; the implication of those who were screaming "The country is being lost" - who now openly declare that it has been.
Listen - if they are a 'true' patriot, and they truly believed that the soveriegnty of their country or its' founding principles were being cast aside or sold out or destroyed, and they did NOT fire their weapons...
...then by their own measure, they themselves would be traitors.
more below.
Imagine, a person knowingly stood by and watched their country being "destroyed".
Wouldn't a "patriot" - especially a "God Fearing", "God Loving" patriot who always reminds us of all the noble men who died defending it - have to rush in to "save" their country if they really felt it was being destroyed?
Were this dichotomy finally to reach an analytical mind, something will have to give. Right now the ones doing the bleating are NOT the analytical ones and they can ignore the cognitive dissonance because they have no idea what cognitive dissonance is.
So far, fortunately, the logical and analytical people of the Right are not typically the ones who speak in such hyperbolic and lethal language.
But these people are getting to know each other.
When the media figure or politician that says the precise equivalent of "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" meets the ears of the one that says "there is no more noble cause than to die for my country", then things will go wrong.
I've been making references to this for a while. I'm called everything from Chicken Little to the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
But folks, this is America. Freedom and liberty have no direct corrolation to common sense, reason, or legitimacy. Democracy, it was said by someone in the circles of our founding fathers, is nothing more than mob rule. Of course, since the Texas School Board has now seen fit to strike Thomas Jefferson from the school books, I am not sure what that means. The ones old enough to have read the school books with Jefferson in it will be firing their guns, and the ones who read the textbooks without Jefferson might not figure out the real reason why.
Our problem is that the guy who fires the gun will probably not need a "reason". Gut feeling will be good enough, or a call from "G"od.
What's wierd now is that it's the minority that is acting like they should have all the power....
Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcom (the 'chaos guy') from Jurassic Park said a precisely astute remark in that movie, when he pointed out that the men who build the 20th century park with prehistoric (live) dinosaurs "stood on the backs of geniuses, but took none of the responsibility. You read what others had done, and before you knew it you slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and you marketed it, and sold it, and you built it..."
The Tea Party crowd is the equivalent of the guys who built Jurassic Park. Dr. Malcom's best line ever was what he said next.
"You were so concerned about whether or not you could, you never stopped to think about whether or not you should."
They walk around talking about "Tea Parties", never realizing that the tea parties were not to protest Taxes outright, but taxation without representation. That's not even the problem here. So they pervert it to mean "Taxed Enough Already" - and bring up Reagan to say that taxes are bad and government is the problem.
But no Republican president has ever presented a balanced budget in my lifetime; no Republican congress has ever sworn off earmarks or pet projects for their own constituents until what - six months ago?. No Republican congress has ever cut spending commensurate with the taxes they demand must be cut.
This diary was not to analyze the dichotomy of the campaign rhetoric of politicians vs. their voting record; both sides are to blame for that.
But the guns, the violence, the rhetoric will reach a critical stage in due time.
It has to.
Think about it - think about a politician who as avocated for "Issue A" for days, weeks, months, even years. They've staked their reputation and even their career on it. So even when their principal stand is proven to be false or wrong, have you ever seen one admit to it?
Alan Greenspan came as close as anything I've seen in the last year when he said that his entire philosophy of assuming the market would police itself was in error. But no Republican has owned up to that or taken a different perspective on all the deregulation hyperbole that they still push today.
So we have a problem. People on the right are coming close to saying "now is the time", some are actually saying the country has been lost, or it's just now being lost, or the people in charge are giving it away or don't know better.
The reason our founders gave us freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, freedom to arm ourselves was to curb the government. Interrupt, or yes - defeat by force of violence and weaponry - any government that "the people" had deemed to be no longer fighting for their best interests.
You can't witness the hyperbole of the Right in the last two years and not realize that one of two things is true:
They're either shameless whores who need attention for personal psychological reasons...(which won't stop them from firing weapons)
Or they really are lucid and rational, who will then therefore have to reach some critical threshold; There will come a moment when someone on the Right will have to admit that if they really think their country is being "lost", then anyone who does not rush in to defend it, or save it, or "take it back" is themselves a traitor.
That's on the books somewhere right? Having material knowledge of a plot against the country?
I figure there there will be some moment in time when one gun is fired...the police will be called out. A crowd will gather. Tempers flare. That leads to more police until it becomes a small riot.
...that leads to the government being forced - to maintain public safety - to calling in more force to stop the riot.
The more force that has to be called to maintain order will allow (in their own minds) the people who started the first riot to declare that the government is out to stop the free expression of the people and therefore....
That will be the moment, the "sign", to the truly unstable (with the guns) that the moment to rise up against the government en masse and "take our country back" has arrived, and it escalates from there.
I'm going to stay away from the comments today, because I know there will be a hundred of you to tell me I'm full of crap and start with the chicken little remarks.
Others will just ignore it and say that this is how things are supposed to be, and it's nothing new.
But when some self-proclaimed "patriot" realizes that by their own definition a "patriot" would never simply protest on a blog if he knew his country was being lost; a real patriot would gather that gun he's so proud of his government for letting him have and realize that is the moment the founders were protecting it to be used.
If a patriot says his country has been lost, then a patriot would be the one to start a revolution - violent if neccessary - to "get it back".
If any patriot truly, in his heart believed that his country is being "lost", "surrendered" or "given away" - they're going to meet their own words coming back to them and say to themselves,
"Well holy shit, brother, if we are saying our country is being lost, then aren't we ourselves traitors if we do not use all means neccessary to 'take it back'?"
That's the moment when the paint meets the corner.
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This is but one man's opinion.
You're free to disagree with it.
I have learned my lesson and will not argue in the comments, for my point of view is already here in the diary itself and I'll let it stand on it's own.
I really hope I'm wrong.
But who the hell ever thought that Ruby Ridge and Waco would give us Timothy McVeigh?
You know the headlines of the Holocaust Museum and the guy who shot the cops in Pittsburgh, and plane that just flew into an IRS buildingare not going to be the last acts of protest that are louder than a sign on a stick.
Yes, these examples are just individuals, and obviously unstable. But the instability is moving at light speed with the media and social networks; At some point the "lone wolf" will gather a "wolf pack" and then the game changes.
This is just a personal observation that keeps me awake.
I'd like to be proven wrong.